Guest · Programmatic, ad tech and supply quality
Luca Filardo
Chief Revenue Officer, Adlook
Fifteen years in programmatic, from an Italian media analyst to Chief Revenue Officer at Adlook, and an argument that accountability now decides where budgets go.
About
Luca Filardo is Chief Revenue Officer at Adlook, where he owns go-to-market and works with the product team to turn client pain points into product. He is known for arguing that programmatic has moved past proxy metrics into an era where every dollar must link to a real business outcome.
Filardo studied maths, statistics and economics, and began his career as an analyst for a media company in Italy. He moved from analysis into commercial work, and fell for the early days of programmatic and the way it let marketers access media through pipes and measure and optimise in real time. By his account he has spent more than 15 years in the industry.
Over 15 to 20 years, Filardo says, he covered technical commercial roles, go-to-market roles and sales roles, a range he credits for making him an effective sales leader today. As Chief Revenue Officer at Adlook his remit runs from building pipeline and growing clients to sitting with the product team so that what the market asks for becomes product that solves real problems. He describes AI as the accelerant reshaping targeting, creative and measurement, and presses publishers to clean up the open web.
Career14 years
- 2022 to now Adlook Chief Revenue Officer
- 2017 to 2022 Index Exchange Head of Platform Partnerships
- 2016 to 2017 AudienceScience Platform Lead
- 2012 to 2017 Re.Birth Distribution Founder
Show earlier roles: Neomobile
- 2013 to 2016 Neomobile AdBusiness
How Luca thinks3 convictions
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Accountability over proxies
Filardo argues the defining demand from marketers is to link every dollar to a real result. He frames proxy metrics like viewability and click-through as a decade-long habit that buyers are now abandoning. The pressure, he says, falls on vendors to prove the connection between spend and outcome.
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Real-time optimisation
Where his early programmatic days meant briefing a strategy and running slow AB tests, Filardo says AI now lets creative and targeting change in real time. He points to triggers such as weather and sports scores that can reshape a campaign with little to no human intervention. Testing hundreds of variants and optimising against the best performer is, in his telling, now routine.
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Publisher UX and the open web
Filardo is blunt that pages crowded with ads push users off the open web. Because his platform bids against attention, cluttered sites lose the time spent that makes them valuable. Cleaner UX, he says, lifts attention, improves marketer economics and lets publishers capture higher budgets.
